Can You Jump This High? Quantifying Barriers to Market Participation

We develop a new method to estimate the parameters of threshold distributions for market participation based on an agent-specific attribute and its decision outcome. This method requires few behavioral assumptions, is not data demanding, and can adapt to various parametric distributions. An application to export decisions by French firms shows that threshold distributions are generally right-skewed. We then reveal the asymmetric effects of past policies over different quantiles of the threshold distributions.